Not at all. It is a matter of highest values and priorities. Teaching obedience and fear first gives you those like in the science fiction film “Soldier” who kill women, children, and the innocent without thinking. To be sure some of the stories of the Bible can be used to support such a use of Christianity – that God wants obedient soldiers ready to do genocide at His command. That is why such such Stephen Weinberg say, “With or without religion , you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion .” What Weinberg says is not true. The fact is that any kind of ideology can do this. But what you have to watch for is anywhere obedience is pushed as the highest virtue as if robots were the best people.
So when we see religion going in that direction we have to stop it dead in its tracks, so that religion is not used for such an evil purpose to serve not the God of Love but the god of this world who does indeed only want absolute unquestioning obedience. But the God of the Bible, who not seeing power as something to be grasped and set aside all power and knowledge to become a helpless human infant to grow up among us and die on the cross for the sake of His love for us that we might have life more abundantly, it is not love out of obedience (which is legalism) He seeks from us, but obedience out of love (which is the law of God written on our hearts). Love first, not obedience first.
Unfortunately the translated words don’t mean exactly the same thing as the original. So to overcome the distortions, we have to remind ourselves of the differences.
And so this is a surprise? That there is no 100% equivalence between 2 words from 2 different languages?
I would recommend the following:
recognize that the Old Testament doesn’t have a good vocabulary for the concept of Soul,
in contrast with the Egyptians who have multiple words and concepts for ideas that Westerners tend to lump together under the rubric of “soul” (see link below).
but there is no word in Greek that does a better job of labeling the relatively modern idea (“modern” meaning, since the Greek philosophers!) of “soul” than the term used in the New Testament: “psyche”!
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The Egyptians had such complicated ideas about the soul that they needed MULTIPLE words:
Perhaps if we look at things from the OPPOSITE viewpoint… here is a paragraph from the Egyptian Soul article that says the Egyptian terminology for “soul” (or parts of a soul) was so unable to articulate the Greek concept of soul - - the Egyptians just went ahead and BORROWED the Greek Word!!!:
“The idea of a purely immaterial existence was so foreign to Egyptian thought that when Christianity spread in Egypt, they borrowed the Greek word ψυχή psychē to describe the concept of soul instead of the term bꜣ [aka the “ba”].”
Let us be clear that although I do not believe in souls being inserted into bodies, I do believe in non-physical (spiritual) aspect to reality which although subjective is the greater reality. In the spirit we have God who created the universe and we have an imperishable existence (1 Cor 15) that continues after death (and made alive by resurrection). The difference is that our spirit is created by and specific to a single body and not something which can move around and inhabit other bodies.
Of course you cannot blame people for thinking in terms of magical substances when they simply don’t have any understanding whatsoever of what is really going on as we do in science. It just like the belief that everything was made from fire, water, earth, and air. These seem like such completely different things. All the more reason to change our thinking over to what is more compatible with the understanding that we do have now about how things work. In the meantime we acknowledge that words used in the text were far less precise and could mean any number of different things.
So, let’s see how REALLY consistent you are. No doubt you have already declared yourself on the following question, but have pity on me, I didn’t memorize your answer.
a] Do you believe in evil spirits possessing humans?
b] Do you believe angels exist and that their bodies are not material?
Hebrews 1:14 “Are they not all ministering spirits…”
If one can entertain angels and not be aware of it then clearly there is considerable subjectivity involved in such an experience. Rather like how people saw the resurrected Jesus and didn’t recognize Him.
Does this mean you think Paul is not the author of this epistle?
Sure, but according 13:2 they can take the human form as 1:14 continues: sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?
Could be a good example.
Hard to say, Paul always starts introducing himself, not in Hebrews, secondly I consider the language use as more eloquent than Paul. All that has to mean not much, Romans was written by Tertius (16:22) under supervision or dictated by Paul.
Incorrect, Hebrews 13:2 says no such thing, and neither does Hebrews 1:14. And I do not accept your premise that appearing as human means taking a physical body. Angles appear as human many times in the Bible, but it does not mean they are incarnated in a physical body. Hebrews 1:14 they are sent out as ministering spirits. Nowhere does it say that they are incarnated in a physical body.
Paul at least makes it clear in 1 Cor 15 that Jesus had a spiritual body not a physical body – imperishable, more powerful, and made of the stuff of heaven rather than of the earth.
Sure… could be that fairies are really angles and that aliens visit us in UFOs. Could be…
But acknowledging that something could be is not the same as believing it is so.
Nope. I do not oppose them. But I do know that modern medicine is more effective in treating the various ills which plague people than a belief in evil spirits.
Yep. I believe in a spiritual aspect to reality. But I do not see a conflict with science because science is the realm of the objective (same for everyone) and the spiritual is the realm of the subjective (not the same for everyone).
Nope. I merely do not know any such thing because I have not experienced any such thing. I do not equate my experiences with the limits of reality itself. Thus this is in the same category as healing with crystals and UFOs. I do not say they are not real, but only that I have no experience or knowledge to affirm any such thing.
Where in the world do you get that from. It is completely contrary to my belief. I am a substance monist. I believe that everything is ultimately the same stuff. But I believe in spirit of the Bible not souls of pagan belief systems - spirits such as God, angels created by God and the spirits created by the choices of living things, just not in these magical “soul” thingies inserted into bodies.
Not so. It’s just that the objective propositional truths and facts about the spiritual cannot be proven in the dimensions that we currently live in. There are more than a few spiritual falsehoods floating around, so I guess you could say those are subjective.
Nope. I said ultimately the same stuff. That is the power of substance monism. It explains different things by difference is the forms of the same stuff. All physical stuff made of the same measureable energy and all physical things are made from the same set of elementary particles. But water is not made of the same particles as light even though these are ultimately the same measurable energy. So even while everything is ultimately the same stuff, spiritual things not made of the same forms of this stuff as physical things.
